Issue 44October 23, 2017

Table of ContentsOpening Salvo: Trick or Treat! 1 ............................................................................................... Music, Audio, and Other Illnesses: Brothers In Arms 2 ........................................................ The Audio Cynic: Dangerous Work 7 ........................................................................................ Hobgoblin: When Is It Time For the Next One? 9 ................................................................... Quibbles and Bits: Lord of the Ring 11 .................................................................................... Twisted Systems: Cables? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Cables! 15 ..................................... Behind the Glass: Trials, Errors, and Beyond 18 .................................................................... Vintage Whine: Stereo at Sixty 24 ........................................................................................... Music'al Notes: Wilmore! 28 ...................................................................................................... ... And Indie for All: Celisse Henderson 30 ............................................................................. Music to My Ears: Satchmo 33 .................................................................................................. Something Old / Something New: The Great 78 Project 39 .................................................. Industry News: AKG Closes in Vienna; Cavalli Audio Closes 42 .......................................... Featured: Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2017 45 ..................................................................... Featured: Digital vs. Analog,br /Ad Nauseum 80 ................................................................... Featured: Confessions of a Beleaguered Music Fan 82 ........................................................ rodrigues: Confidence 85 ........................................................................................................... Parting Shot: Hedges Family Estate, Washington 87 ...........................................................

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Trick or Treat!By Bill Leebens | Issue 44

Welcome to Copper #44!

I hope you were able to attend the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. It was a big, bold show, andspirits were upbeat. I wandered around a bit, and was only able to hit a fraction of the 140+rooms. A photo spread on the show is here.

Dan Schwartz continues looking at his influences; sadly, we conclude Seth Godin’s returnengagement with some thoughts on what comes next; Richard Murison offers a gripping lookat Georg Solti’s Ring Cycle; Jay Jay French mentions the unmentionable audio word,cables; Duncan Taylor tells us about what went right and what went wrong with his latestrecordings; Roy Hall remembers the early days of his career, not so fondly; Anne E.Johnson writes about a dynamic, versatile performer, Celisse Henderson ; and I write abouthow being a musician is dangerous work, and about an unjustly-overlooked anniversary—whilethe Summer of Love and Sgt. Pepper got all the attention. .

Anne is back with a fascinating Something Old/Something New about The Great 78Project; Industry News tells of the closing of AKG’s Vienna headquarters, the birth ofAustrian Audio, and the closing of Cavalli Audio.

I’m happy to present a piece on digital audio from TAS and SoundStage! writer VadeForrester; and our friend John Seetoo is back with ruminations on all that stuff that music-lovers accumulate.

We wrap up Copper #44 with another classic cartoon from Charles Rodrigues, anda Parting Shot of a Washington winery. >sigh<

Until next time—-enjoy, and Happy Halloween!

Cheers, Leebs.

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Brothers In ArmsBy Dan Schwartz | Issue 44

While I’ve been contemplating my next piece, I’ve been thinking about my last one, and aboutthe man who introduced me to audio, my father. I would be very much remiss if I didn’t alsogive the nod to the people who brought the reality of music into our house: my brothers.

Originally I set out to simply tell a little of the tale of my encounters with Jack Casady and PhilLesh. But there were others — the telling kind of snowballed. And the road that I’ve been on,while not directly attributable to my brothers, was, at least, indicated by them. And so I writethis, again, to, hopefully, inspire some reflection on the part of those who read this as to howthey came to encounter our shared passion.

I’m the youngest of three boys, and very much the beneficiary of that. It occurs to me now thatI might have grown up in the most amazing era in America: not amazing for everybody ofcourse — no time can be that (at least not until we get to the time of Star Trek). A few yearsago, I heard a friend’s daughter complain about these times, and that he and I had it much

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better. And: well, maybe so. The modern lament is that we’ve had 40 years of gutting thefinancial hopes of people like me.

But even though we had very little money, the public schools where I lived were first-tier, andthe freedom to explore was at its peak. There was a strong sense that life was what one madeit. And I knew fairly early on that I was going to be an artist of some kind (after a brief flirtationwith the romantic notion of becoming a scientist — all it would take would be a radioactivespider or exposure to a nuclear reactor). Although we rarely fought, in later years, my motherwould try to take me to task for that decision. I said she should blame herself, along with all theother adults around. You can’t expect a kid who gets non-stop praise for having some artisticskill to be afraid to take it on full-time.

As I wrote a few months ago, I had intended the expression to be visual art. The handy thingthere was that all those adults around could tell if I was any good or not. (The principal of myschool took pity on me in third grade and pulled me out of our once-weekly art classes andappointed me as the school’s artist-in-residence — I do recall a bit of a fight she had with theart teacher over that in my presence). But anyway: something else was afoot, and that made itspresence known to most of us on February 9th, 1964.

I’ve heard time and again the tale of kids in the 60s with older siblings: it was the same for me.I might have been 7 when the Fabs came to the US, but that would mean my brother Peter was17. He got the message, even if I didn’t. I saw it, but it didn’t mean then what it would come tomean later. When he went off to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY to get a degree inaeronautical engineering, his record collection began growing, and it would follow him to southJersey when he came home. And that’s when my awareness began.

As a little kid, I had thought of music as two things: classical and everything else. Andeverything else was just like TV — fun but disposable; even the Beatles. In fact, the Beatlesproved it, by being available every Saturday as a silly-ass cartoon.

But Peter, on his visits, was always playing Dylan, and Baez, and then the Jefferson Airplaneand the Doors, and then in 1967, when I was 10, he brought home Sgt. Pepper for my brotherBob (who was 11), and, well — that was that. As I’ve written before, I noticed a couple Beatlestunes before this, “Eleanor Rigby” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which were unlike anythingI’d ever heard. But when I heard “Within You Without You”, I knew that music was ART. Reallyknew. That it was as worth pursuing as anything else.

The next spring I asked for (and received) Magical Mystery Tour: my first record. And Peterbrought home a record that I fell utterly in love with: The United States of America. Iremember driving down Oxford Street in London in early ’69 and hearing singer DorothyMoskowitz on the radio:

You will find them in her eyes

In her eyes

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In her eyes

And I knew that when my feet were on terra firma again, when I was back in the States, Iwould nab it. And I did: that was my second record.

In the meantime, Bob had taken up the guitar before we left, and when we got back to the US,he started playing in earnest. I mean, for real. He was quite serious, and very soon became oneof the best guitarists in the area, and was, stylistically, utterly his own man. It’s impossible todescribe him back then, but I’ll try: he was utterly not-blues based — like a cross between JohnMcLaughlin and Carlos Santana, in his melodicism. And then he started writing music, and itwas gorgeous. This was my brother, writing like this. We both quit high school early to go tocollege, but he left Rutgers and went to Berklee (in Boston) at 16 with a letter ofrecommendation from Mike Mandel, Larry Coryell’s piano player — but only for a year. Later,Steve Swallow asked me where my brother had gone — he was in California by then — andsaid, “Anybody good leaves after a year.”

I didn’t get along with him very well: when I was 18 and planning to move to California to go toUC Berkeley, he called and invited me to come to San Diego instead to join his band with thesomething like the words “I don’t like you, but you’re the best bass player I know, and thisband needs to be great.” I feel like a jackass for agreeing, but at the time, and for quite a whileafter, he was the best guitarist I knew — and his compositions were out of this world.

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Peter and me in the Sierras, 1973.

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Bob in the basement, circa 1970.

These days, Peter lives in Berkeley, Bob lives by the ocean, still plays and is a phenomenalguitar-tech, recently doing that on the road for the Eagles and Tom Petty’s band. And weaccept each other, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes not.

[Header pic is me and Bob, 1977.]

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Dangerous WorkBy Bill Leebens | Issue 44

If 2016 was Snakebit, in terms of the number of musicians who died—what should we call2017?

Sure, last year saw incredible losses in the music world: David Bowie, Prince, Glenn Frey,Leonard Cohen, Pierre Boulez, Paul Kantner, Leon Russell, Ralph Stanley, Maurice White, SirGeorge Martin, Sharon Jones….and on and on. If you haven’t noticed, 2017 has been a roughyear for musicians, as well.

Should we just say that being a musician is dangerous work?

You already know the big names, especially the most-recent ones. But still: seeing the sheervolume of familiar names is a little shocking. And this list is far from complete:

1/7/17: Nat Hentoff, 91 [Longtime Village Voice jazz critic]

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1/24/17: Butch Trucks, 69 [Suicide]

2/12/17: Al Jarreau, 76

2/18/17: Clyde Stubblefield, 73 [Drummer for James Brown and many others]

3/16/17: James Cotton, 81

3/18/17: Chuck Berry, 90

4/11/17: J. Geils, 71

5/1/17: Col. Bruce Hampton, 70

5/18/17: Chris Cornell, 52 [Suicide]

5/27/17: Gregg Allman, 69

7/20/17: Chester Bennington, 41 [Suicide]

8/8/17: Glen Campbell, 81

8/22/17: John Abercrombie, 72

9/3/17: Walter Becker, 67

9/8/17: Don Williams, 78

10/2/17: Tom Petty, 66

If this partial list isn’t overwhelming enough, take a look at this list.

As was the case last year, many of these folks lived to ripe old ages. Allman, Becker, and Pettycould still be considered reasonably young, but the first two had been seriously ill for a longwhile. The cause of Petty’s recent death is still rather uncertain.

The deaths that really caused twinges for me were the suicides. I’ve written before about thesuicides of Cornell and Bennington ; unlike them, Trucks didn’t have a long history ofdepression, but was apparently overwhelmed by debt.

I’m not sure which type of death is sadder.

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When Is It Time For the Next One?By Seth Godin | Issue 44

The most famous line about making comedy gets quoted a lot. Lorne Michaels says, “SaturdayNight Live doesn’t go on at 11:30 because it’s ready. It goes on at 11:30 because it’s 11:30.”

The lesson is supposed to be that you shouldn’t indulge your fear by insisting on perfect.Perfect is, of course, the enemy of the good, and shipping your work and keeping yourpromises are essential attributes for the professional.

But there’s a flipside.

The flipside is that sometimes, profit-hungry, growth-focused companies ship things merelybecause it’s 11:30.

That new and improved thing is new, but is it really improved?

The fact is that most audio companies have high overhead and most audiophiles are ungratefulcurs, unwilling to actively support the very companies that they claim they want to support. Weseek out B stock and used deals and better prices and cheaper stuff, or at the very least, the

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shiny stuff that is the flavor of the day and the cover of the month.

Without a cycle of new and improved, most companies we like and depend on would disappear.We’ve certainly seen what happens to the designer who says, “my work is a classic, we’re notgoing to make new stuff.” He fades away.

And this, of course, is our punishment for insisting on specs and features and hype. Mostlyhype. I know that we insist on it because I see it working, again and again and again. I’m guiltytoo.

The relentless Schumpeteresque cycle of creative destruction brought us all of the wonderful,best-in-the-history-of-the-world-or-at-least-lately, that we enjoy today. But it also creates aregular cycle of dissatisfaction, demonically making our stereo suddenly sound worse, eventhough we didn’t touch it, merely because the next cycle is here.

Can we end the cycle? Not in my lifetime.

What we can do, though, is insist.

Hey, Mr. Stereo Maker–it’s almost 11:30, better make sure your stuff is worth shipping.

(Originally published in Copper #8)

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Lord of the RingBy Richard Murison | Issue 44

Sir Georg Solti was one of the preeminent conductors of the latter half of the 20th Century. Many conductors are polarizing figures, particularly among the musicians over whom they holdsway. It is in the nature of the beast. But the polarizing opinions of Solti are equallydistributed among musicians, critics, the general public, and even his fellow conductors. Mostunusually, Solti’s reputation was built upon one particular recording, or rather one series ofthem, Wagner’s legendary Ring Cycle which he recorded for Decca between 1958 and 1964.

The Ring Cycle is a demanding undertaking. It is a series of four Operas of colossal duration. Most of them go on for a good four hours. It is the very definition of Heavy Opera. Unlikemost Operas, the Ring Cycle has no arias. They are constructed like vast tone poems, with the

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various themes and ideas upon which the plot is constructed being represented by ‘leitmotifs’ –recognizable music fragments – which weave in and out throughout the entire cycle. Wagnerwrote all his own libretti, which are obtruse and allegorical, and in German.

The Ring Cycle is a compositional tour de force. Not only did Wagner turn the entire conceptof what an Opera should be upside-down, he turned the whole idea of how an Opera should beexperienced upside-down. He built a custom-designed Opera House in Bayreuth for theexpress purpose of performing the Ring Cycle. To this day, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus is usedsolely for the production of Wagner’s Operas. And if you should want to go there and hear one,the demand is such that you will have to enter a lottery!

The design of the Festspielhaus was totally radical in its day, and to some extent remains soeven now. It has no boxes or privileged seating. Wagner felt that all men were equals when itcame to listening to his Operas, and there should be no privileged seating for those of highstatus, who would mingle with those of the lowest status who could still afford a ticket. Thereis not a single bad seat in the house. The orchestra pit is most unusual, not only in shape (alarge part of it is in a shallow space underneath the stage), but also in the way its acousticswork. The pit, the orchestra, and the conductor are totally invisible from the auditorium. It isdesigned to project the sound directly onto the stage, and from there to be reflected back tothe audience. To that end, the violins in the pit sit to the right of the conductor, not to the left,so that their sound dispersion pattern favours projecting back over the stage. The idea wasthat the sound would seem to emanate from stage itself, and by all accounts [I haven’t been] itis considered to hold good today.

Wagner wished for his Ring Cycle to be experienced as one single entity. Das Rheingold, thefirst to be completed, was given its own premiere, but the other three, Die Walküre, Siegfried,and Götterdämmerung, were not performed until the opening of Bayreuth Festspielhaus in1876, as part of the first complete Ring Cycle.

Wagner was so determined to achieve the exact sound palette he had in his mind that he wentso far as to design a whole raft of brass instruments especially for The Ring, and thencommissioned instrument makers to go away and produce them. [Bruckner and Strauss arecomposers who went on to call for some of Wagner’s brass tubas in some of their ownsymphonic works.] Das Rheingold even demands an ensemble of 18 anvils with hammers, and(naturally) specifies the dimensions and weight of each of them!

Into this musical context we must also thrust a heavy measure of political context. The RingCycle is dosed to the eyeballs with Germanic symbolism and mythology, expressed always inthe most abstract of ideas. It is therefore manna from heaven for those who would wish for itto be construed to support their own extreme philosophies, particularly as they bear on race,history and culture. Wagner was also somewhat of an anti-semite, an attitude which seemed todevelop relatively late in life in response to his perceived public adulation of Mendelssohn andMeyerbeer – and not Wagner. Anti-semitism was quite fashionably established across manywalks of life in a mid-19th Century Europe which was still a good 100 years away from

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discovering political correctness.

When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement adopted Wagner’s music as being emblematic ofwhat they perceived as their own philosophy, the linkage became indelibly cast for an entiregeneration of Europeans who faced death, destruction, and even extermination at the hands ofGermany over the course of two world wars in rapid succession. The Nazis perceived inWagner’s writings support for their most extreme ambitions, and many observers were willingto take these interpretations at face value. Even today there remains considerabledisagreement over what Wagner’s personal beliefs may have been, and how to properlyinterpret them in the light of today’s very different societal mores.

At the outbreak of WWII, Georg Solti was a young conductor seeking to embark upon a careeris his native Hungary. He was also a Jew, and had the good fortune to find himself in Lucernewhen the war broke out. He was wisely advised not to come home, and saw the war out inSwitzerland. At the end of the war he was invited to participate in the reconstruction of post-war Germany by taking on the prestigious post of Director of the Bavarian State Opera inMunich. Although he had no real experience conducting Opera – and was a Jew to boot, nevermind not being a Catholic – he took up the post and held it for 5 years before moving on to asimilar post in Frankfurt.

Fast forward to 1956, and John Culshaw of the Decca Record company in London was anxiousto record a major classical work that would showcase the capabilities of the new stereophonicmusic systems that were just being introduced. He knew that the drama and sonorities ofWagner’s Ring Cycle would be absolutely perfect for the task, but received a lot of resistancewithin Decca because of the political ramifications. This was, after all, only 11 years after thewar, and in Britain the population was still on rations. So the complications – and cost – ofrecording such a work were not to be underestimated.

But neither was Culshaw, and in 1958 the project got underway with the recording of DasRheingold. Georg Solti, by this time gaining a reputation as a rising star in the world of Opera– and not having risen so highly that his availability to commit to such an undertaking was notan issue – was contracted for the task. The Vienna Philharmonic, the most prestigiousorchestra of the day, were also signed up. Culshaw wanted to recreate for the home audiencethe experience of going to the Opera, but he did not wish to record a live performance, with allthe ‘warts-and-all’ aspects of doing so, even though it would have been a lot cheaper. So hecommitted to a studio recording. Also, he wanted the flexibility which a studio setting wouldgive when it came to microphone placements. His attention to detail was such that he evenhad 18 new anvils custom-made to Wagner’s original specifications.

Das Rheingold, the first and the shortest of the four Ring Cycle Operas, was an ideal vehicle totest the waters. It would take less work to record it, and Decca could spend some time seeinghow the record did before committing to the remainder of the cycle. As it happened, DasRheingold was a great success, outselling even Elvis Presley’s latest offering (to the enormousconsternation of rivals EMI), but even so it was not until 1962 that the forces were

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reassembled to record Die Walküre. By the time Siegfried and Götterdämmerung werecompleted in 1964 the whole enterprise was beginning to take on almost legendary status. TheBBC even sent a film crew out to Vienna to make a documentary about the recording of theCycle which is still available on DVD as “The Golden Ring”.

Success was not an adequate word. Solti’s Ring Cycle was a stunning success. To this day this15-hour exposition of some of the heaviest Opera on the standard repertoire remains the bestselling classical music recording of all time. Let me give you an idea of how highly it is rated. In 2009, the Esoteric company of Japan performed a complete multi-channel digital remasterand released the result in a 14-SACD boxed set. They put it up for sale in December 2009 in alimited edition of 1,000 sets priced at $800 by mail order only. By April they had all sold out.

Solti’s recording of the Ring Cycle remains a tour de force, and is still regarded as probably thefinest classical music performance – certainly the finest Opera performance – ever captured forposterity. The success of the recording made Solti an international sensation. He wasappointed Director of the Royal Opera Company, Covent Garden, and from there went on tohold the Directorship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 25 years. In each case he tookover a provincial ensemble of no great reputation and shaped it into one of the finest in theworld, collecting both admirers and detractors along the way. Sir Georg Solti died in 1997, onthe same day as Mother Teresa, and in the same week as Princess Diana. But his name willforever live on in association with his great recording of the Ring Cycle.

Here is a cool YouTube extract from the BBC Documentary “The Golden Ring” that Imentioned. The excerpt is Siegfried’s Funeral March from Act III of Götterdämmerung. I thinkit captures the essence of Georg Solti and his Ring Cycle rather wonderfully.

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Cables? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Cables!By Jay Jay French | Issue 44

In the world of high end audio there is probably no subject as controversial then the retail costof high end cables vs. what they really bring to system.

While that may be the subject of a more specific future article that I may write for Copper, thisarticle is how, as a salesman, I tried to wrap my head around the process of “selling” them.

I first started working at Lyric Hifi in NYC in 1995, at that time the most expensive audiospeaker cable Lyric carried was made by MIT and retailed for approximately $8,000 a pair.

Just 1 year later MIT debuted yet another, more expensive speaker cable with never beforeseen large boxes near one end.

We were told that these boxes contained a network of electronic circuits that were supposed tocontrol the frequency and time align the delivery to the speaker.

HP at The Absolute Sound wrote about them and Lyric, which always, somehow, had thehottest product featured in TAS at the exact time that TAS waxed orgasmically aboutsomething, carried the whole new MIT line.

In order to create further excitement at the retail level, MIT sent a couple of guys to spend twodays at the store demo’ing the cables for us and teaching us (meaning the salesman) thereason(s) why the cable was so effective and, as a byproduct of this kind of “advanced”research, justify the new (and even more insane) cost of $12,000 per pair!

Armed with this new amazing and fantastic cable we could then explain (in depth and detail)

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to anyone whose pockets were deep enough, why they “Had to have it”!

There is some of logic in all this, I guess.

I just listened to what the MIT reps explained to us and, after listening to these cables on ourreference system probably convinced myself that they were “worth every penny”.

Having been at Lyric at that point for over a year and having the opportunity to play with someof the world’s most expensive “toys” I became less desirous of owning the stuff. Not that Ididn’t avail myself of the connections I made and the great discounts I got. I did and I puttogether a really great but sanely priced reference system.

I just no longer jones’d about owning the biggest or best.

Just ‘really good’ now worked for me!

But still, this was Lyric HiFi, the most famous Hi End emporium and many of the clients wanted“the best” and one could never lose sight of that.

And then…

One day I walked into work and Mike Kaye announced that we would now be carrying not justanother cable line but “The Best In The World”!

I can’t tell you the brand of the cable because I need to tell you about a conversation with thecompany’s president that probably said more to me about the entire high end industry thananything else I ever learned.

I don’t need a lawsuit (neither does Copper) but I do need to tell you what this cable presidenttold me.

We were told that this new, incredible cable line was fairly extensive but the reference speakercable at the top of the range was priced at a then staggering $22,000 for a 15 foot pair!

$22,000.00.

In 1997.

For….wire.

OK.

So then Mike says that the owner is coming to the store in about a week.

And, about a week later, in walked the owner of the cable company. He was unlike anymanufacturer I had met up to that point. He had a real swagger: a hustler’s swagger. He was

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not an unassuming ‘nerd’ type.

As a born and bred Manhattanite, whose father worked on 47th Street in the Jewelry district,and as a musician, I had spent years on 48th street, I knew a hustler when I met one.

I walked up to the guy and introduced myself.

I walked him into one of the demo rooms, away from other customers and said “MIT was here acouple of months ago to explain to us about the technology involved with their new cable lineand especially how to sell their new $12,000 cable. What do I tell a customer when he asks whyyour cable cost almost twice that amount at $22,000 for a 15 pair?”.

His response, to this day, pretty much summed up my entire high end retail experience.

He looked at and said “Son. if somebody askes you why this cable cost $22,000 for a 15 footpair, you just tell them that there is a lot of good shit in it!”

Then silence.

I was waiting for a laugh, a wink, some kind of humorous fallback…

Nothing.

I then said “You really want me to say that?”

He continued, “Listen, if a guy buys a Mercedes he doesn’t care how the steering wheel isconnected to the drive train and the tires. It’s a damn Mercedes. If someone is spending 100kfor a system that means he wants the best. My cable Is the best. Period. Tell if they want thesecond best buy the MIT!”

Sounds pretty logical to me and the complete opposite of the MIT presentation..

This was predatory, type A, NY salesmanship to the max!

I told this to the salesman who sold the most and said (and knew) the least.

He said “See, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I always say, ‘This one is good, this one isbetter, this one is best’. Take the credit card and ring it up!”

This effectively marked the end of me thinking that I was going to educate a customer.

After this, I just started “selling” them.

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Trials, Errors, and BeyondBy Duncan Taylor | Issue 44

When I parked around back of PS Audio’s headquarters on the morning of our recording, Igreeted Danny and Tim next to a stack of PS Audio boxes that did not look light. I was gratefulfor Danny’s help loading our new recording gear, since I am, in Tim’s words, a “small person.” Iknew I’d be moving the P10 and other PS gear all day, so no complaints here!

With the gear in the car, I drove to meet Darren and his wife Amanda at the recording locationa few miles outside of Boulder. Small, private recitals for the donors of the CMF/CMA are heldat a donor’s home, and this particular home was exceptionally elegant. It’s built atop a smallhill which provides a stunning view of Boulder and the foothill mountains beyond.

As beautiful as it was, the main attraction for us was the purpose-built piano performance roomin the basement, which was home to one of the stars of the day, a gorgeous Steinway model Dgrand piano. Soapstone covered the floor in the immediate area around the piano, irregularwalls helped kill resonances, and the sound quality from the audience position was really prettygood.

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The home’s owners Susan and Frank were very generous to let us set up so early. I knew we’dwant as much time as we could possibly have, even though this was to be just a two-channelstereo recording. The main event was scheduled for 2 p.m., and even though we began loadingin around 10, we had either the right amount of time or not nearly enough, depending on howyou look at it. But that’s sort of jumping ahead in the story — my apologies.

I met Darren and Amanda downstairs in the piano room, and we began to unload all of the highend audio stuff we had crammed into our little cars. A bit of legwork later and we had a stackof PS Audio gear in place, Darren’s battery-powered mic preamp up and running, our cableslaid and the microphones connected. It was early, so I began to set up my secondary recordingsystem as Darren worked on the laptop and prepared for testing.

I didn’t want to focus too much on my secondary recording, at least not at the expense of themain DSD one, so I ran through the setup and made a snap decision to use a figure-8 near thelid of the piano instead of the cardioid that Paul Cantrell suggests with his recording method. Ichose figure-8 because I wanted some sense of space of the room, and also some crowdreaction.

Inside the piano, affixed to the back of the music desk, about 1/3 of the way from the left andpointed straight back at the tail, Cantrell uses an omni mic designed specifically for piano.Omnidirectional microphones are pressure mics, and cardioid and figure-8 are pressure-gradient. Which means that for cardioid and figure 8, the farther away from the source themics are, the less realistic will be the bass response. The way I see it, this close to the bassstrings I wouldn’t suffer as much from the problem of a non-omni polar pattern rejecting thebass.

I probably could have gotten more warmth from an omni, but I didn’t have one on me so I trieda cardioid in its place, and I liked the results. This is an unconventional recording setup and itis not symmetrical, so the mics need to be balanced by ear, and Paul even suggests specificequalization help for each channel. As this was not the phase-linear, direct-to-DSD recordingchain, I didn’t have a problem with touching the sound a little, though I took a light approach.

As an aside, sometimes recording decisions made quickly in the moment can be great. I’vegotten faster at hearing and acting on the sound I like, and sometimes too much thought canlead me down an unhelpful rabbit hole. I threw these secondary mics up and leveled and EQ’edthem in about 10 minutes, and the result will show the beauty in what I like to call “informedwingin’ it.”

I was happy with the secondary setup, so I turned back to the main rig and hopped behind thekeys so Darren could run some tests. About this time, Terri and Paul McGowan showed up —Paul, so he could lend his ears in our mic placement effort, and Terri so she could witness theimpending beautiful impressionist piano music up close and in person. Unfortunately, what Iwas playing for our tests was far from beautiful, yet we pressed ahead and recorded DSDtracks of the piano at different distances.

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I chose the starting point for our main microphone setup based on our earlier tests, and also onadvice from a set of PDFs in German that I found that describe how several classic pianorecordings were made. As CMF/CMA donors arrived and began milling and chatting upstairs,Paul, Darren and I zeroed in on the spot we liked for the pair of Neumanns in ORTF. It wasabout this time that we started noticing something strange in our tests.

An intermittent, slight clicking sound could be heard on playback of the .dsf files we werecreating (via DoP). We had set up a fairly complex recording and monitoring system with thislaptop as the centerpiece. We were recording from a NuWave Phono Converter, fed from aBHK Signature preamp and Darren’s mic pre. We were also using a DirectStream DAC torender the sound back through a connected headphone amplifier.

My first thought was that there might be some latency in playing back the file. We listenedagain and again and unfortunately we identified clicks at the same locations each time weplayed them back. We were still hoping that it was an effect of the software converting DSD toPCM on the fly, but that explanation was losing weight as we tried to wrap our heads aroundthe issue.

Right about then, Benedetto came downstairs to warm up his fingers. We took the opportunityto record more tests and study the click issue further. But after two quick songs, he was readyto perform. The guests were then called downstairs to take their seats as the recital began.

I spoke to the audience quickly about our project and the method of recording, and asked theaudience to place their program sheets on the floor, and to please stifle coughs. Benedetto thenspoke for several minutes about the material he had chosen to play.

The first composer, Nino Rota, is best known for scoring the soundtrack to The Godfather.But, as Benedetto told us, he is also known in his circles as a brilliant composer for piano. Thefollowing 15 short concertos would display a wide range of ideas from Rota, and prove to beappropriately matched for the subsequent French impressionist compositions of Ravel andDebussy.

I really enjoyed Benedetto’s take on Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante defunte,” which showedto me a deep understanding of the composer’s ideas. Too often I hear a pianist or orchestrabashing through Ravel like a bull in a china shop — and I have no clue why. Benedetto’s pacewas superb in my mind, and he showed real sensitivity in the rendition.

Without further adieu, I present the Benedetto Lupo private performance for CMF/CMAdonors, on July 28th at Susan and Frank’s beautiful home in east Boulder.

You’ll notice those are not DSD files. Ah yes! Here we get to the juicy part.

After a lovely performance and more sweat lugging the recording gear back to PS Audio, wecouldn’t help but wonder what it sounded like. Darren had the DSD rig, and I had my

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secondary one, so we each checked out what we had gotten at our homes.

My PCM quickie recording wasn’t just good, it was interesting. It had this dancing quality tothe placement of notes and a strange cohesion despite being asymmetrically placed mics ofdifferent patterns.

And then I got the bad news, via text. Darren listened back to our DSD recording, and theclicks were still there. He listened on a couple different computers and methods of playback toconfirm.

What had happened? Why hadn’t we discovered this in our tests at the chapel? These questionswould fill our minds in the coming days, but I was still excited to show him what I had managedto capture.

The next day at PS, we took both recordings into Music Room One and listened. Low-levelclicks dominated the DSD recording. On close listen, they sounded like skips — really fast ones.The stereo perspective was great, and the tonality was very nice, but the file was stillunlistenable. DRAT!

I played my secondary recording for him. Remember — this was recorded with my battle-testedgarage mics and a budget USB mixer. It sounded great! It certainly reminded of the old adagethat a $100 mic in the right location can sound better than a $1000 mic in the wrong one.

As PS Audio forum user jeffstarr pointed out in a comment on a previous installment of thisseries, VinylStudio is quite packed with pop and click filter and EQ and noise control features.Having used some of the best touch-up softwares out there in the past, I really do thinkVinylStudio’s sound tools, for what they do, are quite decent in comparison and certainlyexcellent for the money. Since the DSD file was in the program already, I thought I’d try theclick removal on our main rig recording.

After two or three successive scans, the program found more than 8,000 clicks! I removedthem and the recording was more listenable, but it just wasn’t right in some way. Always one totry an interesting idea, I converted it to PCM (using XLD) and overlaid the track onto the PCMsecondary recording. I aligned the tracks at the beginning and mixed in the DSD one slowly. Asthe recording played back however, I noticed that the timing quickly went out of alignment.

Huh! Sample rate conversion error? After some thinking, it hit me. The clicks in the originalrecording actually were skips in time, which made the DSD recording longer than thesecondary PCM one. Well shoot. So much for our pure, DSD stereo recording being useful atall.

The culprit

We soon discovered that when we chose to record in DSD, we also needed to optimize thecomputer and the program for doing so — no user-friendly feature in Windows or VinylStudio

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would do this for us. I’ve since learned all about “interrupt requests” and buffer sizes, but thismistake being of our own ignorance kind of stung. Thank goodness I had decided to do asecondary recording!

This is the kind of stumble that forces you to get serious about an element of your system. Inour case, we’d never again accept a computer error getting in the way of our recording, andrendering everyone’s hard work fruitless. Backups will be the norm going forward.

We still did have our PCM recording, and after I made sure the donors quickly received a CD inthe mail, we set to work trying to tackle the computer issue for good.

In comes Gus

We had always wanted Gus Skinas, developer of the Sonoma DSD recording system andcurrent owner of the Sonoma brand, to be involved in this project in some way. At PS, weconsider him our sensei of DSD. And of anyone, he has the most experience with multitrack andmultichannel DSD recording. He also has a damn good set of ears. We knew he was busy butwe wanted to pitch him on the project, so Darren invited Gus to PS Audio for a meeting.

It was the type of meeting you always hope for. Kindred spirits realizing our common love andenthusiasm for rich, digital recordings. I think what sold it for him was how much effort wewere going to undergo in order to not charge and actually provide an income stream formusicians who record with us. Gus saw our passion and our progress and decided to offer usone of the greatest resources we would stumble upon yet: a Sonoma recording workstation.

Whaaa— holy shit!

“Oh yeah,” Gus said, “I think there’s one here at PS, actually.”

Son of a gun… there was an 8-track Sonoma sitting here under our noses. Ha! Gus says thatone is fairly old and might need a lookover, but it was ours to use if we wanted it. Oh, we wantit.

He also mentioned that the Sound Performance Lab Atmos ASM5 multichannel microphonetree his friend owns might also be available to us. That fancy rig is a 5-mic surround array thatdominates most of the rooms it’s placed in. Our Grimes hall being on the large side might offeran ideal environment for surround, and in the least it would be useful for stereo recordings —the front half of it is actually a Decca tree.

Darren and I couldn’t believe our luck. As we said goodbye and THANK YOU to Gus on his wayout, Darren came over to my desk and we marveled at what just happened.

Asset after asset had been falling into place for our upstart recording venture, and we felt likewe had just been lifted onto a new wave. The momentum was building. Invisible Audience wasgaining steam.

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~~~

But here is where I put this story into park for the time being. We’ve applied for grants, andhave secured enough initial funding to build my legion of absorbing and diffusing “gobos.”We’re in talks with a videographer and I am reaching out to artists to start planning forsessions.

In the time ahead, we will get this project rolling and get some DSD files made. In this column,I’ll revisit the story when there’s more to share. And in the meantime, I’ll swing back to mytrusty old subject matter — I’ve still got a few great Second Story Garage recordings to writeabout.

Thanks for reading this long-winded recollection, and thanks for the interest in what we’redoing.

Sincerely,

Duncan (and Darren)

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Stereo at SixtyBy Bill Leebens | Issue 44

We’ve heard a lot about anniversaries in 2017, with it being the 50th anniversary of Sgt.Pepper, the Summer of Love, the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, and much more.One anniversary that’s received zero attention to my knowledge—-is the 60th anniversary ofthe first single-groove Stereo LP, manufactured by Audio Fidelity in October of 1957.

Stereophonic sound reproduction is not new: two-channel sound was demonstrated as far backas 1881, when paired telephone receivers transmitted performances of the Paris Opera tonearby rooms where performances could be heard using a receiver for each channel/ear. Inrecent years, “accidental stereo” recordings from as early as 1929 have been unearthed byarchivists and record collectors: performances where two or more microphones and cuttinglathes were run simultaneously. When properly paired together and synced precisely, a stereoimage emerges. As you can imagine, the task of syncing multiple 78 rpm records was not easy;recent compilations of such accidental stereo recordings utilize sophisticated software tosynchronize the recordings and eliminate variances in speed or pitch. A review of onecollection of “reconstructed recordings” can be seen here.

1931 saw development of stereo recordings on both sides of the Atlantic: Fletcher and Keller atBell Labs developed binaural electrical recording equipment and made recordings withStokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, while Alan Blumlein at EMI submitted patentapplications for stereo recording techniques. There was continued development in stereorecording techniques until that pesky war intervened.

And then, post-war: Magnecord recorders, based upon (cough) bounty-of-war technologydeveloped by Magnetophon in Germany, were adapted to stereo recording so as to aid in NVH(noise-vibration-harshness) amalysis for General Motors, of all things. By 1951, Emory Cookhad released stereo reel-to-reel recordings of trains, setting a standard for stereo demos thatcontinues until today, sadly. A few years later, Cook cut stereo discs with separate grooves foreach channel, played back by a two-headed pickup arm reminiscent of a freak snake in a circussideshow.

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A Cook binaural playback system—two mono cartridges, separate grooves for each channel.

Fast forward a few years to 1957 : Westrex, an offshoot of Western Electric, demonstrated asingle-groove 45/45 cutting lathe for LPs. Unlike the Cook system, it required a single, newly-developed stereo cartridge to trace two channels at 45 degrees to one another in a singlegroove. Most major labels were offered development units and pondered their course of action;Audio Fidelity, a tiny NYC label dedicated to sonic spectaculars (those damn trains again!!) andtitles designed to capitalize upon trends and current events, raised a stink until they got theear of Westrex.

What happened then is characteristic of the sensationalist nature of the label. Westrex, tryingto appease the squeaky wheel, cut masters of a disc of Audio Fidelity stereo recordings inOctober of 1957. Side one had the Dukes of Dixieland, a featured act of the label; side twohad—you guessed it—trains and sound effects. Westrex intended the masters to be test-cuttings, representative of what could be done, but not really de-bugged and ready for release.There were noise issues and phase aberrations that they thought would render the recordunacceptable for general release.

Sid Frey at Audio Fidelity didn’t see it that way: he saw an opportunity for the little label togain a big profile.

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The first stereo disc, AFLP 1872, was issued in a simple black jacket with a stuck-on gold label,unlike the sensationalist/cheesy covers that became a trademark of AF. 500 copies of the demodisc were pressed, and in mid-December, Frey advertised in Billboard that AF would send acopy to anyone who wrote him on a record company letterhead.

Bingo: a star was born, and despite the disc’s deficiencies, the little label had beaten the biglabels to the punch.

Audio Fidelity’s first stereo disc, in a funereal black jacket. And what is it about trains??

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The 1959 Fawcett magazine Hi-Fi Systems featured “Man On the Go”, a gosh-wow, hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show profile of Frey which was classic little guy vs. giants hype. By that time,Audio Fidelity had issued a couple dozen sonic spectacular stereo discs, and was anacknowledged leader in the rapidly-growing niche market.

This article is so gushy that it must’ve embarrassed even Audio Fidelity’s PR team.

The label never achieved the level of respectability of Mercury’s Living Presence recordings,and they very rarely achieved Mercury’s level of artistic merit or, to put it bluntly, class. Google“Audio Fidelity album covers”, and you’ll get a sense of the hucksterism and soft-core porn inwhich the label indulged.

And yet, and yet: Audio Fidelity was around for decades, and issued an astonishing number oftitles, as you can see in an amazing work of obsessive-fanboy data-gathering, seen here andhere.

Radio Shack and other companies kept the Audio Fidelity demo discs alive well into the ’70’s. Cheesy or not, hucksters or not—happy 60th Anniversary to the first single-groove stereo discsfrom Audio Fidelity!

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Wilmore!By Roy Hall | Issue 44

“Where is Roy Hall? Roy Hall? Stand up.” My heart sank.

A lifetime ago I worked for the now defunct department store called Abraham & Straus. Asmanager of the furniture department, I was in charge of about eight people. They were a slimybunch. One of them, Vinnie, was positively unsanitary. He would sidle up to customers,seemingly involving them in something conspiratorial. He would often whisper into women’sears and engage them at a fundamental level. He was disgusting but he sold more than anyone.The rest were aspiring used car salesmen. I made friends with one of them, Emil. He taught mehow fish out of Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn and introduced me to Beefeater Martinis for whichI am eternally grateful. Unfortunately I caught him embezzling money from the store and hewas let go in disgrace.

The bane of my life was Mel Wilmore, the store manager. He was a mean son-of-a-bitch thatreveled in putting people down. His style was to walk onto the sales floor, find somethingwrong, yell at you in front of your staff and customers and make you feel like shit. Everybodyhated him. He had risen up from stock boy to manager and had a chip on his shoulder. He wastall and thin and had bad teeth. He often shouted at me for one reason or another. One eveningabout ten minutes before closing he came down to the furniture floor. We were in the midst ofrenovations and in one area some sofas had been left in disarray. He went ballistic. We all hadto stay late, after the store had closed, to reorganize the area. The following morning theinterior designer arrived and saw the result. He then had a fit and we were made to redo all ofthe previous night’s work.

Part of the responsibilities of a manager was to do sales reports. After the store advertised a

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sale, the managers had to send in pages of reports about goods sold. This was beforecomputers so compiling these reports was tedious. It was even harder for me because furniturewas a ‘Big Ticket Item’ so named because the sales slip was large and contained a lot ofinformation. It also had 5 layers of carbon copies and the one left for me was the last one. Itwas often blurry which made the report even harder to do. My reports were always late. Evenif I came to work early I never managed to finish in time. This caused me untold grief. My bosswould yell at me. His boss would scream and when Wilmore heard about it my whole day wasruined. I was warned that if I didn’t get it together, I would be fired.

It was the Fourth of July, the biggest sale of the summer and when it was over I looked at thestack of invoices and knew I was screwed. There was no way I could get through that pile intime. I threw caution to the wind and filled in the report using guesswork alone. I completedthe report and handed it in on time. I waited for the storm. Nothing happened! A few weekslater there was another sale. I filled in the report the same way and waited: again nothing, andanother, and another…

A few months later all the managers were summoned to a meeting with Wilmore. He hadrecently been on the warpath and the rumor was that he was fuming about the sales reports.The meeting started with him calling us a lazy bunch of good-for-nothings and then he startedto scream about the tardiness of sales reports. We were all atremble. He called out individualmanagers by their names and systematically debased them. It was getting ugly when he said,“Where is Roy Hall? Roy Hall? Stand up.” I went pale. Not only was I about to be fired, I wasgoing to be publically disgraced and humiliated in front of my peers.

“Roy Hall runs the furniture department. He has to extract the information from Big Tickets.His reports are always on time. If he can do it, you can do it.”

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Celisse HendersonBy Anne E. Johnson | Issue 44

Sometimes indie songwriters also write theater pieces. Much rarer are those whose talents areso wide-ranging that they perform in Broadway shows and hit TV sitcoms. Celisse Henderson isin the second category.

When she’s not touring with Godspell or appearing on 30 Rock, Henderson is in the studio,accompanying her strong, rich voice with the many instruments she plays, including guitar,piano, violin, ukulele, bass, and African drums. She has a reputation as a warm and engagingperformer (something else that can’t be said of a lot of indie types, who tend toward theintrospective), and you’ll find plenty of video evidence of that below.

Henderson’s debut EP, Show & Tell, from 2010, was an impressive introduction to her work.She took the album’s function literally, opening it with a track called “Intro to Me.” (Maybemore artists should do this.) You do get to glimpse all sides of her in this song. The drumsdemonstrate her love of complex rhythm. Her big vocal range and depth of emotionalexpression is on display. And the rap section shows three equally important things: 1) She isproud of her African-American heritage and respects all its musical traditions; 2) She wants touse music to tell stories; and 3) This woman is not street, but stage. Her perfect standardizedAmerican diction reminds me more of “Witch’s Rap” from Sondheim’s Into the Woods than thework of Snoop Dogg:

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Henderson is clearly steeped in many forms of jazz. She’s not afraid to step outside the regularrhythmic patterns expected in pop tunes, as you can hear in the bold guitar phrasing in thesong “Baby Blue.” The lyrics employ a conversational style that happens to be sung: “I saw youopen a door for an old lady in the street / I saw you give money to a man so he could havesomething to eat.” The way Henderson chews her words in this song evokes Alanis Morissette:

The EP Nashville Demos is not filled with the country tracks you might expect. The crunchingguitar chords opening the first track, “Fool’s Gold,” announce that fact loud and clear. AndHenderson can pull a sweet blues solo out of that guitar when she needs it. The vocal style andrange say “jazz,” but the discomfiting harmonies say “grunge rock.” Whatever it is, it’spowerful:

It’s unusual for an artist to release a live performance before her first full-length album. Buton-stage is where Henderson is most at home, so the 2012 EP Live at Rockwood Music Hallmade sense. She offers up the song “Well” like it’s a personal message to members of theaudience, as if each of them had asked her how she was feeling after a recent break-up. Eventhe choice of ukulele rather than guitar brings the scope to a more intimate level:

She shows off bebop-inspired piano chops in the song “Enough,” with its unpredictablyaccented, dissonant chords. Yet those off-kilter phrases aren’t just influenced by jazz. There’s anew school of Broadway composition – think Pasek & Paul’s Dear Evan Hansen or Jason RobertBrown’s The Bridges of Madison County – that relies on this kind of lonesome melodicwandering, especially in sad love songs.

Henderson’s broken heart turns out to be the theme for the entire EP. Fortunately, we also getto see her recover from it. (And here comes that country music I’d expected earlier.) “I’m OverYou” is a bouncy bounce-back song. The lyrics don’t cover any ground a thousand songwritershaven’t trod before, but Henderson is such a skilled singer and she exudes so much enthusiasmthat it’s hard not be drawn in:

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Although she hasn’t released an EP in a few years, she keeps on writing. She also keeps ongigging (often at the terrific cabaret space, Joe’s Pub, run by the Public Theater in Manhattan),which gives her plenty of chances to try out new material. She’s too hip for the room in thisfunk-inspired number from 2016, “Crazy,” even if her mugging makes the words hard tounderstand:

The majority of Henderson’s songs deal with romance, good and bad. But like many Americanartists, she has recently discovered an urge to use her pen to react to the political landscape.The 2017 song “America” delves more into a pure rock style than is typical for her. Then again,she doesn’t see the situation as typical. “We’re having a breakdown, we’re losing control,” shesings. But she also has hope:

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SatchmoBy WL Woodward | Issue 44

The Roaring 20’s changed life in America in radical ways. The 18th Amendment passed onJanuary 16, 1919, and prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicatingliquors ” within the US, one year after ratification. Implemented by the Volstead Act, itresulted in every bar and saloon in the country closing on January 16, 1920. This forced themanufacture and distribution of alcohol underground and changed the small local hoodlumgangs running numbers and hookers into major criminal forces running politicians and cities.

The 19th Amendment known as the WTF Act gave women the vote for the first time. Arevolution happened to the fairer class as more women joined the work force and starteddeveloping lives outside the home. For the first time in America’s history more people lived incities than on farms. The earnings of the average household increased dramatically, and likeall good Americans they looked around for places to spend it. Consumer goods became morenationally ubiquitous with the start of national ad campaigns. And what they bought a lot ofwere radios.

The first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, went on the air in 1920 and three years

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later there were 500 stations nationwide. By 1929 12 million households had a radio. HenryFord revolutionized the manufacture of the automobile and in 1924 the cost of a Model T was$260 and by the end of the decade was not only affordable but was owned by 1 in 5 Americans,going from a luxury item to a necessity. And they drove those cars to the movies. In 1929 3 of4 Americans went to the movies every week. Langston Hughes, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald,Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Eugene O’Neill became prominent literary andcultural forces.

The decade was called the Jazz Age. If it wasn’t for that pesky Crash of 1929 the era wouldhave been remembered as the greatest time in our history. And that jazz. Jazz in 1920 wasmainly a Dixieland/Creole experience, and the musicians spent that decade looking for newways to invent, expand, experiment and exploit an idiom that was more and more in demand asthe nightclubs sprang up around the nation and the world. Louis Armstrong went from 19years old and a prodigy in Oliver’s King Creole Band to a 29 year old recording star.

Louis Armstrong was married from the time he was 17 years old until the day he died, andpretty much continually, to four different women. But it was his second wife, Lil Hardin, whoinfluenced his music more than any other and who early on recognized Armstrong’s talent andpotential. In 1923 right after they were married Lil convinced him to leave Oliver’s band inChicago and move to New York. Lil Hardin Armstrong was a strong willed and single mindedmusician and business manager and she molded an often recalcitrant Armstrong, changing theway he dressed, appeared on stage, his stage presence, and even convinced Louis to playclassical in church groups to expand his musical thinking. Upon moving to New York he washired in Fletcher Henderson’s big band.

This is 1924. Big bands were just becoming important and swing was but a glint inHenderson’s eye. Many musicians were working into swing, most notably Chick Webb, butHenderson was a master arranger and a major force in the development of the style. Henderson went on to become Benny Goodman’s arranger in the early to late 30’s and was thecreator of a lot of those great arrangements performed by Goodman’s band we remember sowell. But in 1924 he was playing a little constricted and within more of the confines of the‘white’ bands like Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. The arrival of Armstrong changed that.

Henderson recognized Louis’ talent, but was reluctant to let him break out. He was not fond ofhis singing, and preferred Armstrong stay on the charts with his playing. The band itself wasfull of talented but more classically trained players who seemed content to be who they were. Armstrong was not, and would never be content to rest on laurels. He wanted to be somebodyand the few times Fletch let him sing or solo the reaction from the audience and the musiciansshowed Louis (and Lil) he was very special. Armstrong was only with Henderson for a year andmoved back to Chicago in 1925, but before leaving New York he was in demand all over town,recording with the great Sidney Bechet whom Armstrong remembered following around as akid in New Orleans. And he changed Henderson’s band, giving it more freedom and space. But Lil had moved back to Chicago to take of her ailing mother. Louis missed her and sheconvinced him to move back.

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Armstrong was welcomed back as the returning hero. Lil who came from Oliver’s band hadcreated her own band and brought Louis in. But by the end of 1925 it was Louis Armstrongand the Hot Five. Here is a recording from that year featuring Kid Ory on trombone, JohnnyDodds on clarinet, Johnny St. Cyr on banjo ( still a percussive instrument in 1925) and Lil onpiano. The opening trumpet solo is wonderful and despite the tepid feud between Louis andthe bop generation (Armstrong called it re-bop and “Chinese music”!) they give this solo propsas probably the first hint of bebop playing. This is a Joe Oliver tune called West End Blues andan early Okeh recording.

The sustained trumpet note at 2:34. Yeah, go back.

By the 1930’s Armstrong had become seduced by the big band craze. Tommy Rockwell fromOkeh Records and the producer of some of the more popular Hot Five recordings knew Louis’potential and introduced him to Louis Russell who had a hot band in Harlem. Russell hiredArmstrong and from here he learned the ropes of the big band. Armstrong formed his ownwith a revolving door of great musicians. The band was popular but Armstrong chafed underthe rigors of being responsible for 12 or 15 musicians. But he made some marvelousrecordings including this, written by Hoagy Carmichael (an early Armstrong worshipper) andrecorded by everybody, even Willie Nelson.

But despite the popularity of bands like Goodman and Glenn Miller, by the end of the 30’srunning a big band was not something that could be done by many. The war caused a hiatus,and then by 1945 the genre was unmanageable and all but dead. In April 1946 Armstrong andhis big band played the Aquarium in NYC. Fans and musicians gathered to hear the greatestjazzman in the world. But Pops arrived with one of the largest, loudest and worst bands in hiscareer. Time magazine gave the show a horrible review and it appeared Armstrong washeaded in the same direction as many other big band leaders. But a few months later an angelappeared in the form of United Artists.

UA wanted to do a movie to tell the story of New Orleans in 1917. Titled New Orleans itfeatured Louis, Kid Ory, Barney Bigard (an early teacher of Louis’) and Billie Holiday, but moreimportantly put Pops back into a small ensemble setting. The result was Armstrong startedrecording with big and small bands and fully realized that the small sessions could really beatthe crap out of doing larger bands. He started looking for better opportunities. Armstrong wasapproached by Town Hall music director Bobby Hackett about doing a ‘one-night’ show at thefamous hall.

On May 17 1947 Louis showed up to a packed house and went over the songs with themusicians because there had been no time for rehearsals. But this was no large band where

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slackers could hide, this was a band made up mostly of musicians who’d played with him beforeand were some of the best in the industry including George Wetting on drums and JackTeagarden, the trombone master, who’d recently given up his own big band because he wasbroke. The result was a huge success and Louis and the All Stars were born. The die was castfor the remainder of Armstrong’s career.

Satch solidified the All Stars and hired Velma Middleton as singer. She quickly became acomic sidekick to Armstrong. Her voice wasn’t strong but this woman could make an audiencelaugh and was great for Louis’ act which contained some silliness and downright vaudevillianrelief. She was a large woman, going three hundred pounds, who used to be a dancer andwould do these James Brown type splits on stage. Wish there was some video of THAT. Popsloved her and so did the audiences. Here’s Velma and Pops in 1947.

Jazz musicians had gotten pretty serious by this point starting with guys like Dizzy Gillespieand Charlie Parker playing the same Town House with their Be-Bop group in 1945, then intothe 50’s with the invention of ‘Cool Jazz’ with the like of Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. Armstrong’s act, that had all that musical comedy, the campy grinning and eye rolling gavethese serious blowers fits and even into the 60’s there were accusations of ‘Uncle Tom’. Hissinging was often described as gritty and harsh (obviously by critics who’d never heard theprevious ‘Stardust’ cut) and even derided his scat singing with criticisms that he’d justforgotten the words and was mocking the artists who wrote those words. While touringAustralia, 1954, he was asked if he could play Bebop. “Bebop?” he husked. “I just play music.Guys who invent terms like that are walking the streets with their instruments under theirarms “. In 1957 Armstrong took a radical stance on a Little Rock flamer involvingdesegregation of schools, even calling out President Eisenhower, calling him ‘two faced’ andhaving ‘no guts’. Armstrong was roasted for his stand by the usual press, but he was genuinelysurprised when none of the musicians calling him a tom backed him up. Not one.

What these clowns really missed was Armstrong’s work ethic. He played 300 gigs a year,evidenced by the fact he had four wives and only one kid, and was known by the people heworked with as a tireless worker. Throughout his life he took his music seriously, even as heconsidered himself first and foremost an entertainer. He bypassed the usual after gig partiesand would instead go back to his hotel to write, both music and letters. In the late fifties hewas touring world- wide and was considered the Ambassador of Jazz, but he lost musicianswhen they became exhausted from all the touring. Joe Glaser, Armstrong’s long time manager,was blamed for the killer schedule but the fact was Louis would have done it anyway.

In the late 50’s he toured constantly, as usual with a couple of world tours. In 1960, he took abreak from touring. On the 1959 tour he’d suffered a heart attack and by 1960 was showingsigns of health slowing him down. But he recorded with the likes of Dave Brubeck, DizzyGillespie, Oscar Peterson, and Ella Fitzgerald. His desire was unflaggable. In 1963 he

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recorded “Hello Dolly”, which became his biggest hit, and in 1967 “What a Wonderful World”,recognized world-wide as classic Louis Armstrong. These tunes made it into every show he diduntil he died. He never had an over-sized ego when it came to his music. He played what hisaudiences came to hear. Audiences from all over the world. In the mid 60’s he toured Africa,Asia and Europe including countries in the Soviet bloc.

By 1969 he was ready to celebrate his 70th birthday but his health was in the way. In ’69 hedidn’t tour at all, just rested. His doctors proclaimed him ready to tour and he immediatelyembarked, but another heart attack sent him home for good. Satch died a few days just beforehis 70th birthday at his long-time home in Queens, the first and only house he ever owned, onJuly 6.

In 1956 a remake of the Katherine Hepburn/Jimmy Stewart/Cary Grant classic PhiladelphiaStory, this one called High Society, starred Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, CelesteHolm and Louis Armstrong. As you’d expect this was a musical, one of the distinct departuresfrom the original. Obviously the musical factor set High Society apart. Frank, Bing, andSatchmo? The three first name guys all left permanent legacies, and the names still evokememories. I was 2 years old when this film first came out and I’m from the rock generation butI know what these men did and still do to the listener. And the music. Written by Cole Porter,each song had its own life and still flowed with the story line. I am not a fan of musicals. Usually the music is heavy handed, over used and more of an affair than a marriage. I cancount the musicals I love on one hand, and this is one of them.

The movie featured the 1956 version of the All Stars, Ed Hall on clarinet, Barrett Deems on thetraps, Trummy Young on trombone, Billy Kyle on piano and Arvell Shaw on bass, all long timemembers (except Young who joined the All Stars in 1952) of one or another of Armstrong’s bigand small bands. Fronted by Crosby for this cut, it explains for the Newport cognoscenti howjazz is made. Der Bingle is having so much fun in this cut it brings me misty every time. Yeah,this is sappy stuff. Shoot me.

Bonus.

I need to give credit to two biographies of Pops that I used for a lot of material in this column, Louis Armstrong by David Stricklin and What a Wonderful World by Ricky Riccardi. Bothrecommended.

[A footnote: a year ago the only known footage of Satchmo in a recording studio wasrediscovered after having been lost for almost 60 years. Interestingly enough, the recordingwas for Audio Fidelity Records, mentioned in this issue’s Vintage Whine column. Take a look

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and enjoy Satch in the studio.—Ed.]

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The Great 78 ProjectBy Anne E. Johnson | Issue 44

There was a time, in the first half of the 20th century, when several-minute segments of musicwere served up on giant black platters. This was the era of the 78s, shellac discs that spun at78 rotations per minutes. Much of that material has been piled in basements and storeroomsfor the past many decades. But now the ARChive of Contemporary Music (ARC) and InternetArchive is bringing those long-abandoned recordings back to life in an astonishingly ambitiousendeavor called the Great 78 Project.

If you visit their website, you’ll find more recordings than you can possibly sort through, all ofthem available for free streaming. The count is currently at over 35,000, with more addeddaily. ARC claims its 78s holdings number 200,000, all of which need to be transferred todigital, then uploaded to the site. The physical records have been donated to ARC by librariesand individuals; ARC’s partnership with Internet Archives has made the digital transfer projectviable.

Rather than reviewing the recordings themselves (a hopeless and frankly pointless task), I wantto talk about the public site and the experience of accessing it. Once you’re at the home page,you’ll click “Listen” on the upper right. That takes you to a list of all the thousands of availableholdings. Yes, you could just start randomly clicking. That’s fun, believe me: on the day I’mwriting this, the top of the list is somebody called Chubby Jackson and his Orchestra, playing apretty hep swing number called “The Happy Monster.”

But it’s also essential to be able to search and browse in useful ways. I’ll start from theperspective of searching. First question was, what do I search for in a database of 100-year-oldrarities?

I tried a famous name: Ellington. I was surprised how many results that yielded, but after a fewseconds I realized I’d unintentionally stepped outside the 78s project. I was seeing all thetracks available at Internet Archives, from all periods and source formats. On the left margin I

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had the option to tick a box next to “78s,” which yielded 295 results. But those were acombination of formats, including some videos (so why were they tagged as 78s?) and somehad a “Borrow” or “Wait list” button (the Great 78 Project does not lend out its material, sothese must be part of a different collection).

Returning to the Great 78 Project home page, I figured out my error. I’d missed a small box onthe left margin labeled with a pale gray font: “Search this collection.” A-ha! I’d done a generalsearch of the whole Internet Archives because that was the most obvious search box. So I triedthe Ellington search again, and this time got nothing but 78s. Here’s a great one from 1934,called “The Saddest Tale.”

Of course, you might have no idea which artist you want to hear – discovering hidden gems ispart of the point of this collection – so I tried entering other types of search terms. The word“Broadway” yielded over 200 results. Some were songs with the word “Broadway” in the title,like the silly “Broadway Polka” by Ray Henry and His Orchestra. Some were by artists with“Broadway” in their name, such as a fox trot called “Burning Sands,” recorded in 1922 bysomebody called the Broadway Syncopaters.

And then there were items tagged as Broadway music when they were uploaded. For example,there’s a rather smarmy crooner version of “Stranger in Paradise” (from the musical Kismet) inan undated recording by Bud Roman and the Lew Raymond Orchestra.

As you’ll know if you use many library catalogs, sometimes searching is not the best way to findinformation, especially if you’re open to the unexpected. The other approach is browsing.

Browsing works through the use of tags attached to individual catalog files. The trick, though,is that every time a particular tag is used, it must be entered into each item in exactly the sameway. Otherwise you end up with a mess. The Great 78 Project clearly uses non-librarianvolunteers to upload the tracks and build the files, so it’s a mess. Let me explain:

Starting again from the complete uploaded collection of 35,000-plus entries, I hunted for a listof browsing tags to choose from. I found it under the header “Topics & Subjects” on the leftmargin (that left margin is jam-packed!). The tags were 78rpm, Popular Music, Jazz,Instrumental, Hillbilly, and Country. Beneath those was an arrow and the word “MORE.” So Iclicked on that, expecting the list to expand a bit. Instead I got a huge pop-up, four-column listof hundreds of genres — not in alphabetical order! And capitalized words were distinct fromcapitalized, so one could choose either the genre “children” or (randomly, two columns away)“Children.”

By clicking a blurry little icon at the top I made the entries alphabetical, but now withcapitalized words first, so “Children” and “Children’s” were on page 1 of the list, but “children”and “childrens” (no apostrophe?!) appearing as separate categories on page 3.

This is a big problem. When it comes to serious research, a library is only as good as itscatalog.

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You can also browse by year, which is interesting. The list of dates is –you guessed it– in theleft margin; it bafflingly spans 1900 to (I kid you not) 2026. There’s also a list of artists asrandom and maddening to use as the genre list.

Despite these organizational drawbacks that might affect scholars, The Great 78 Project offersan infinite amount of entertainment to lovers of old recordings. Did I mention that, becausetheir copyrights are expired, you can download most of these tracks as well as stream them?The variety is staggering, from opera arias to harmonica solos, from comedy bits to tangos.Here are a few of the more fascinating things I’ve dug up:

“The Delmar Rag” (undated), composed and played by Charles Thompson

“Steal Away to Jesus” (1919), sung by the Fisk University Male Quartet

“Vesti la guibba” from I Pagliacci (1920), sung by Mario Brefelli

“Nightingales, Actually recorded in Beatrice Harrison’s garden, Oxted, England” (1927)

“Song of India,” by Rimsky-Korsakov (undated), performed by an unknown chamber group

Organ Concerto in B-flat major, mvts II and III, by Handel (undated), performed by Dr. E.Bullock on the Westminster Abbey organ with an unidentified orchestra

“I’ll See You Again,” by Noel Coward (1940), performed by the Decca Salon Orchestra

“Ready Teddy” (1956 – the end of the 78s era), performed by Little Richard and His Band

As you can see, there’s something here for everyone with a curious musical mind. But bewarned: it’s a mesmerizing rabbit hole twice as addicting as YouTube. So clear your schedulebefore you jump in.

[Sorry: I’ve got to stick in my two pfennig’s worth. The noise-reduction is nonexistent on thesecuts, and emphasize every stereotype of 78s as being hissy and crackly. I’ve heard78s—especially acoustical recordings played back through big Victrola and Edisoncredenzas—that sounded more real and alive than multi-million dollar sound systems. I’m gladthese records are available, but I’m a little disappointed in the presentation.—Grumpy Ed.]

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AKG Closes in Vienna; Cavalli Audio ClosesBy Bill Leebens | Issue 44

As reported in Copper #42, Harman laid off 650 employees in its Pro Audio divisions. SinceHarman’s purchase by Samsung last year, the company has undergone a series of contractionsand consolidations, which many industry folks would argue were necessary given widespreadredundancy in Harman organizations. The first noticeable effect of this round of layoffs was theclosing of the Crown factory in Elkhart, Indiana; the second major effect is the shutdown of theVienna headquarters of revered brand AKG.

That’s the bad news. The good news that the core engineering group from AKG has formed anew company, Austrian Audio.

As is true of pretty much anything related to Harman, this story isn’t as simple as it firstappears. There have been no mentions of the Crown and AKG closures in any Harman press-releases, but it appears that AKG the brand will still exist, with products made in China—butwhether the company will maintain its significance remains to be seen.

Here’s the first report of the formation of Austrian Audio; here’s an interview with the head ofmarketing of the new company.

———————————

Cavalli Audio, a longtime favorite of headphone listeners and the Head-Fi community,announced that the company would be shutting its doors at the end of October. Theannouncement from Alex Cavalli read:

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“Dear Friends,

“It is with a heavy heart that I would like to inform everyone that Cavalli Audio will be closingits doors on October 31, 2017.

“I have been involved with this community for a long time and am forever grateful that I couldplay a part in the evolution of both the hobby and community since 2000. I have beenprivileged to watch and be part of the growth of a niche of dedicated headphone listeners,always in pursuit of better sound. I recall many conversations about how to improve sound andproduce a better overall experience through headphone listening. This community has spurredmuch innovation in headphones, headphone amplifiers, and associated gear. Some of thisinnovation is now part of the products we can buy off the shelf. Truly something to be proud of,as few industries have been this influenced by the members of its community.

“For my part, I have been fortunate to create amplifiers that most people seem to really like. Iam grateful for the support for these amps and for our fantastic customers.

“The reasons for ending CA are purely personal. I have been semi-retired during the life ofCavalli Audio and had always intended to pass along the baton once I had been able toestablish a robust company with excellent products. I have been looking for such a partnershipfor some time now and have, unfortunately, not been able to form a reliable partnership withanyone to continue my legacy and at this point, there are a number of things more demandingof my time, including an ever-increasing collection of grandchildren.

“I have worked to keep certain aspects (the best aspects) of CA alive after the end of thecompany.

“The first part of this has been the work with Massdrop (as most of you are aware) to continueto make Cavalli designs available at affordable prices. When I was still considering movingforward with CA I had begun to create an entire line of lower cost, but still great soundingamplifiers. Though there are no certain plans beyond the CTH and Carbon, with any luck a fewmore of these new ideas can be made available through MD.

“With the closing of the company, all warranties will expire. I realize that this will concernmany, but the amplifiers will continue to be supported by a reputable service and repairfacility. To ensure this support, Avenson Audio has agreed to continue servicing CA amps.Avenson has done final assembly for every big CA amp and currently do all the repairs to CAamps. Current owners will be in good hands if such a need arises. A link to their website is onthe CA website.

“I know that this news may come as a shock to many while others might have anticipated thistransition. I would like to thank everyone for their support over the years. I love thiscommunity and its passion for all things headphone and have been made to feel part of itsextended family. My obligations to my own family, however must take priority at this time.

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“My thanks to all of you.

“Alex”

The fact that warranties will expire is a little troubling, and going to the Cavalli Audio websiteproduces a warning notice.

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Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2017By Bill Leebens | Issue 44

RMAF this year was back to full size, with the memories of tents and blocked-off rooms behindus. The show seemed particularly busy Friday morning, as you can see from the long line atregistration shown above. The rest of the weekend seemed busy, with traffic waxing andwaning as always. I saw more younger folk and females this year, and was glad of that. 140+rooms made it challenging for anyone to cover all the rooms (not to mention the Marketplaceand 70 tables in CanJam); as usual, I saw only a fraction of the exhibits. Sorry!

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The day before the show: clear skies, beautiful weather, changing leaves. Perfect.

The all-new exterior of the Denver Marriott Tech Center. More than one exhibitor passed by the place,not recognizing it!

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The fancy-schmancy lobby. It’s a lovely place…but some of us miss the Rancho Deluxe vibe of the oldinterior.

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The completely-remodeled restaurant area. Those windows above used to be rooms with balconies. Nomore water balloons from drunken exhibitors….

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Enter if you dare….

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Can Jam: back in its proper space, after last year’s tent show. The calm before the storm.

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Full house. What a difference a few hours makes.

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This was a busy place. As always, I was struck by the relative silence. Headphones!

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Tonearm gurus Tri Mai of Triplanar and Frank Schröder of…Schröder.

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Paul McGowan of PS Audio, Schiit-head Jason Stoddard, Audiophiliac Steve Guttenberg.

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Chad Kassem of Acoustic Sounds, in the marketplace.

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Axiss Audio demoed speakers from Swiss company Piega with Air Tight amps.

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Full house at Exogal, w/ CEO Jeff Haagenstad.

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The cast-iron speakers from JERN, with the affable Ole Lund Christensen.

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A badly-backlit “Captain” Bob Carver with his ribbon speakers. Lighting in exhibit rooms was oftenchallenging.

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Sam Willett of Classic Album Sundays, pre-recital.

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Madisound featured speaker kits and components, as usual.

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The amazing Vanatoo Zero speakers in the $500 Entry-Level room offered a real taste of major league soundfor minor league bucks.

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One of the Innovations rooms showed prototypes of a desktop acoustic lens system. Umm.

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JWM Acoustics in the Al Stiefel room offered great sound and beautiful gear, including…

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…genuinely stunning turntables, based around Rega components.

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A striking cherry red amp from Dan D’Agostino—another challenging display to photograph.

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Reel-to-reel tape decks in the J-Corder room.

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Musical Surroundings had an impressive display of Clearaudio turntables.

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The inimitable Philip O’Hanlon demonstrating Gryphon gear from Denmark.

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The impressive VAC/Tannoy system.

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Bea Lam of VTL demonstrating the Vandersteen/VTL system.

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The PS Audio/Focal/REL system…which sounded pretty terrific, if I do say so myself.

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The Rocky Mountain International Hi-Fi Press Awards, hosted by Roy Gregory.

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Jana Dagdagan and Herb Reichert (the man, the myth, the legend) of Stereophile.

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Dave Clark of Positive Feedback; Tyll Hertsens of InnerFidelity; Marjorie Baumert, head of RMAF; MichaelLavorgna of AudioStream and Stereophile.

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At show’s end: Herb; Leebs; Scot Hull of Parttime Audiophile; Brian Hunter of AudioHead; Carol and DaveClark; Jana; innocent bystander Alan Kafton; Michael; Tyll.

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The day after the show: welcome to Colorado! Say hi, Buster!

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Digital vs. Analog,Ad NauseumBy Vade Forrester | Issue 44

“What If Digital Had Never Happened?” writes Steve Guttenberg in the October 2017 issue ofStereophile. It’s a thoughtful, well-written piece. I just wonder why the audiophile communityneeds another piece glorifying analog recording and playback.

Digital has become the de facto standard for music recording and playback. Get over it. There’sno question that digital recordings can be made to sound bad—as can analog recordings. Butdo all digital recordings sound bad? Not to my ears—not by a long shot.

Why we must continue to flog the dead horse that is the analog vs. digital debate? Is there alack of substantive issues to fill the pages of audio magazines? Can’t we just enjoy listening toboth types? As a collector of LPs since the early 60s, of CDs since a few years after theirintroduction, of digital downloads since HDTracks first came online, and now a frequentlistener to Tidal, I have had no trouble finding high-quality recordings in all formats anddelivery modes. All types of recordings can provide rewarding listening experiences, just as all

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types can sound like crap, yet I’m puzzled at what seems to be increasingly shrill insistencefrom certain segments of the audiophile community that only analog recording and playback isworthy of audiophile attention; even claiming that digitally recorded music cannot be pleasantto listen to.

Here’s what I continue to believe: If it sounds good, it is good. You should listen to whateveryou enjoy. But please, let others do the same. If you prefer the sound of analog recordings,that’s totally cool. But you’re missing something. Look at the ads for “new” LPs—almost all ofthem were recorded long ago. I’m not criticizing that music—there were great recordings ofgreat performances made back then. I enjoy it as much as anyone, and listen to it often. But theLP market is virtually (don’t ignore the virtually) all reissues. And then reissues of reissues.How many copies of Sgt Pepper do you really need? If you want to listen to most recordings ofmusic made in the last 30 years, you’re probably going to be listening to a recording with adigital history; probably recorded digitally, then distributed on a physical CD, downloaded, orstreamed over the Internet. I’m not talking about new contemporary music, I’m talking aboutvirtually all music recorded in the last 30 years, whether it’s brand new or was writtenhundreds of years ago. Newer LPs are quite often made from digital masters, and for somereason, are often deemed by gurus to sound better than the same masters reproduced digitally.For an interesting commentary on digitally-mastered LPs, see Brent Butterworth’s excellentSoundStage! article, “Do Digital Masters Ruin Vinyl Records?

Further confounding logic is the notion that reproduced music should come from a physicalmedium, whether a disk or a disc or a tape; of wanting to feel and touch and maybe even readliner notes about the product from which our music emanates. Some magazine gurus celebratethe touch factor as important to the enjoyment of listening to music. For a slightly handicappedperson like me, or one for whom aging has reduced mobility, lengthy playback rituals are apain (literally); if I have to observe such rituals, it significantly reduces the time I have to listento music. But if you enjoy it, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a complex playback process.Neither is there anything whatsoever wrong with enjoying music sourced from digital files,stored on a hard drive or network, and conveniently selected from an iPad. Personally, I’drather spend my time listening to music than futzing around with an LP or CD, but, hey: it’syour choice.

Here’s the formula that works for me: interesting, well-recorded music + decent playbackequipment + a convenient playback process = hours of enjoyment. If I change the formula toread interesting, well-recorded music + decent playback equipment + a longer, inconvenientplayback process then that = fewer hours of enjoyment. Your mileage may vary, and that’scompletely OK. I just hope we could agree to pursue our own individual routes to musicalenjoyment without being bombarded with further claims of superiority for one method oranother. Then maybe our debates could focus on something important—like music. Or is thataudiophile heresy?

–Although Vade Forrester reviews audio equipment for The Absolute Sound and TheSoundStage! Network, the opinions expressed here are strictly his own.

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Confessions of a Beleaguered Music FanBy John Seetoo | Issue 44

While most Copper readers are fans of different types of audiophile gear, the one love that Iwould lay odds that is universal for all of us is the love of music. While we all have spentembarrassing sums at times on amplifiers, speakers, turntables, CD players, tuners, preamps,et al and regretted them afterwards, purchase of music is probably the single largest expensewe all share. I would venture to guess that readers’ collections that exceed 500 titles areprobably ubiquitous and collections of thousands of titles would be more common than onemight suspect. I think some of my personal experiences might seem familiar to a lot of Copperfollowers:

I must confess that I have been a music-buying addict from age 10. Growing up in NYCChinatown, I would spent hours every week after school or work at J&R Music to browse cutoutvinyl bins for records by artists whom I might have read about but never heard, and couldn’tafford to pay full price for a record that I might not like. My album collection soon took up anunfair amount of space in the bedroom I shared with my brother. I unashamedly admit that I listened on a monophonic portable record player with a tiny 3” speaker during that time.

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When we became musicians in our teens, guitars, basses and amplifiers took up what preciousspace was left. When I was 14, we received a hand me down Zenith hi-fi set up that wasessentially a piece of furniture: two sliding panels on top revealed a record changer on the leftand a tuner/amp on the right, built into a 4-legged dresser sized unit with a pair of speakersmounted roughly 30” apart – something that could have come from an episode of “Mad Men.” While it was hardly high fidelity, it was true stereo, so I was able to hear discrete left and rightchannels for the first time. A whole world of music listening opened up for me as I could finallyhear Neil Young and Stephen Stills trading guitar solos from the left and right on 4 Way Street,the layers of Jimmy Page’s “guitar army” on Physical Graffiti, or the dense orchestration ofRenaissance’s Novella and Annie Haslam’s five octave soprano soaring above the strings.

While I couldn’t afford the kind of hi-fi system that I read about in magazines or auditioned instereo listening rooms, I was lucky to get a connection from a cousin’s boyfriend who worked inthe stereo equipment business. I knew enough to get a Grado cartridge, a belt drive turntable,a receiver with <1.0 THD, a cassette deck (for all of the other records I couldn’t afford), andspeakers. After hours of making myself a nuisance in many stereo listening rooms, I decidedupon what is still my best stereo purchase to date, almost 4 decades later – a pair of Ohm C2speakers.

Over the next few decades, my collection of titles would grow exponentially as my vinylpurchases continued unabated and was augmented with my cassette collection, whichcomprised live recordings of my band, out of print or import records owned by friends orborrowed from the library, and mix tapes. When I finally moved to my first apartment, theentire collection and stereo followed. I had to build a shelf unit to hold the stereo and my nowburgeoning VHS tape collection, along with a small 19” color TV and VCR that I rigged to feedinto my stereo system’s auxiliary channel to get stereo sound for the movies.

The Compact Disc became the latest thing. I resisted for a few years, then succumbed on apost-divorce depression day and bought a CD player and a few discs. A new addiction wasborn. I tried my best to resist buying titles on CD that I already owned on vinyl, but theinclusion of bonus tracks self deluded me into justifying paying double the price for the samerecord (that often didn’t sound as good as the vinyl, since the analog to digital converters werestill in their infancy) for an extra two songs that were left off the original record – usually forgood reason.

As I got older, I continued to buy records, but CDs became my choice format as the A to Dmastering improved. Some of the stereo gear was replaced over time, but the Ohm C2’sremained. My music engineering mentor, the late Dennis Ferrante, told me that JBL 4311speakers were standard for Record Plant East mixing when not using the larger Altec or Ureisystems. To my delighted surprise, one store had the JBLs next to the Ohms in their listeningroom, and they sounded very, very similar. Koss AAA headphones exhibited a similar responseas well, so these became my main reference tools for mixing when I built my private recordingstudio. I even started a job on Wall Street to pay for these expensive hobbies, as I soonrealized that film and music work would never afford me the income to raise a family.

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Flash forward to 2017:

Several recording projects and releases and a thousand or so more additional titles later, thewhole paradigm has changed. My daughter has now graduated college and has her own place.As empty-nesters, my wife and I scaled down from a 3 bedroom in Manhattan to a 1 bedroommodern high rise in Brooklyn. The walls reflect contemporary construction and respectfulvolume levels are observed throughout the building. She prefers the Marie Kondo aesthetic –anything non-essential is deemed to be clutter! Her opinion is that with Netflix and Spotify,there is little need to have shelves of DVDs, CDs, Tapes, Vinyl, etc. and that speakers can beportable and Bluetooth connected, so there’s no need to mount them or put them on bookcaseshelves. My recording studio has been reduced to a Lexicon USB interface and my laptoprunning a DAW. I have snuck a few guitars into our home – the rest are in storage, along withthe amps. The rack mounted recording gear and all of the other analog equipment, now worthuntold more money, has gone – some via eBay, some via donation. My stereo is also in storage– although it will probably be considered antique when we finally relocate and I have aseparate room where I will be able to set it up. I still have the Ohms and the Koss AAAheadphones. They still sound great, last time I checked.

While I have been forced for space reasons to sell or discard a few hundred titles on cassette,vinyl and CD (that I have dutifully backed up on digital files), I still easily have at least 1500titles in those formats – all in storage. A small box contains my current rotating CD rotation,my wife’s concession to the otherwise strict Kondo aesthetic. Spotify certainly helps me to keepabreast of new releases, but the sound quality still leaves much to be desired, even onheadphones. Bluetooth speakers are a least common denominator – everything sounds thesame – better bass response and clarity than my humble Zenith hi fi of yesteryear, but a far cryfrom the luscious musical adventures delivered by my Ohms.

I think it is ironic that vinyl that I couldn’t give away when CDs were popular are now selling ascollector’s records for $30 and up. There are many titles that I still have, like Japanese onlyreleases by Ryuichi Sakamoto or overlooked artists who never became popular on their own,like the hard to find live LP, Night After Night by Nils Lofgren. As convenient as streaming maybe, there is still so much music from the analog realm that has yet to be digitized.

The pressures of living space aesthetics, economics, spousal imperatives, and growing olderare some inevitable challenges for a great many of us music lovers. For those of you who sharemy travails – hang in there. Maybe you can’t hear the music you loved in its preferred format,but at least it is preserved in its original state, unlike lost performances of the moment duringthe centuries before recording technology. For those who have been able to keep a footholdand maintain your preferred listening setups – I salute you and envy you at the same time. Thepleasure of listening to great music with an optimum sound system where one can just get lost in the experience is one that should be cherished in this modern age. David Chesky mentionedin our interview that listening to music in a room and not on headphones is something that thecurrent generation misses out on; I hope we are not the last generation that will be able toappreciate that kind of magic.

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ConfidenceBy Charles Rodrigues | Issue 44

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Hedges Family Estate, WashingtonBy Bill Leebens | Issue 44